Untangling a web of temporal relations in news articles

Abstract

Temporal reasoning has been the focus of several studies during the past years, both in linguistics and computational studies. Although advances on this topic are undeniable, there are still improvements to be made and new avenues to pursue. One relevant problem concerns the temporal ordering of the events, particularly asserting and representing how events are temporally related and how the story told in the narrative evolves. This paper aims to analyse the temporal structure of narratives present in news articles with the aid of di"erent visualisations. To this end, we annotated a dataset of 119 news articles in European Portuguese following an annotation scheme that combines di"erent parts of ISO 24617-Language Resource Management - Semantic Annotation Framework (SemAF). The temporal layer of this annotation scheme identi!es the events and their main features, as well as the temporal links between the events. The annotation provided us with paramount information about the temporal characteristics of news at two levels: the story and the report levels. The visualisations that we propose facilitate the process of understanding how news are temporally organised, providing a more practical means to observe them.